The pandemic continues to take its toll on all of us, but one thing remains clear: our community’s children must continue their education. For Jews, education is not just what we do, but who we are at our cores, and the true reason for our survival as a nation.

While the public schools in much of our region have opted to delay opening or operate with a hybrid of remote and in-person learning for the next few months until they work out logistics, our community’s parents who send to yeshiva day and high schools breathed a huge (masked) sigh of relief as their children veritably ran into their school buildings this week.

While masks, social distancing, “cohorting,” plexiglass dividers on desks, and distractingly open windows are certainly counterintuitive in the personable, interactive Jewish day school environment, and are particularly challenging for our youngest children and those with special needs, we hope our gifted teachers and rabbanim can make up for the challenges in other ways. To quote one of the many talented participants of our awesome Jewish Link mask art contest (see winners and honorable mentions on pages 84-87), “we are smiling under our masks!”

Truly, though, we hope in our reporting last week and this week, that we were able to convey and acknowledge the amount of work it took for the school administrators, teachers and medical advisory committees to get to 2020’s first day of school, to execute workable plans for student and staff safety, consistent with federal and state pandemic guidelines. And we understand the risks that COVID-19 may resurface even in places where people have been most careful. We truly know that everyone is doing their best, and we know our schools will take steps to continually reassess safety and
protocol.

We wish everyone a wonderful, healthy, happy and successful year in school!